Yang Jiang

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Alternative Title:
Yang Jikang

Yang Jiang, (Yang Jikang), Chinese writer and translator (born July 17, 1911, Beijing, China—died May 25, 2016, Beijing), was a versatile writer greatly admired for her spare, elegant prose, as exemplified in her best-known works, Gan xiao liu ji (1981; Six Chapters from My Life “Downunder”, Eng. trans. by Howard Goldblatt), a recounting of her experiences of “cadre school” and “reform through labour” during China’sCultural Revolution (1966–76), and Wo men sa (2003; “We Three”), a mixed-genre memoir of her life with her husband, renowned scholar Qian Zhongshu (1910–98), and their daughter, who died in 1997. Yang graduated (1932) from Suzhou University and then enrolled for graduate studies at Beijing’s Tsinghua University. She and Qian, whom she married in 1935, spent three years at the University of Oxford and in Paris, returning in 1938 to China. During the 1940s Yang made a name for herself in Shanghai as the playwright of successful comic plays. She returned to Beijing after 1949 and worked on translations of European works; her translation of the Spanish classic Don Quixote, published in 1978, was regarded as definitive. Her only novel, Xizao (1988; Baptism), tells the story of Chinese academics adjusting to the changes in the country during the 1950s. In her later years, in addition to editing manuscripts left by Qian, Yang produced a translation from English of Plato’s Phaedo as well as a philosophical essay collection, Zoudao rensheng bianshang: zi wen zi da (2007; “Arriving at the Margins of Life: Answering My Own Questions”).